Autopsies
The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each autopsy, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.
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Choosing your specimen
Week 1 — picking the one closed restaurant you'll spend the semester dissecting, and the rules that make a specimen usable.
Week 1 · 27 July 2026
Building the case file
Week 2 — collecting primary evidence about your specimen before you're allowed to have a theory about why it closed.
Week 2 · 3 August 2026
The location audit
Week 3 — testing whether the site itself was ever viable, using foot traffic, rent signals and nearby competition.
Week 3 · 10 August 2026
Reading the menu like financials
Week 4 — treating a public menu as a financial document, and submitting the Specimen Dossier.
Week 4 · 17 August 2026
The reviews nobody believed
Week 5 — plotting review sentiment over time to find the point the decline actually started, versus the point people started talking about it.
Week 5 · 24 August 2026
Borrowing a method
Week 6 — applying a professional post-mortem framework from outside hospitality to your specimen, after this week's lecture.
Week 6 · 31 August 2026
The landlord's alibi
Week 7 — testing the most commonly blamed cause of closure against your actual evidence, instead of accepting it by default.
Week 7 · 7 September 2026
Service failure, reconstructed
Week 8 — cross-referencing multiple reviewers' accounts to reconstruct a consistent timeline of what actually went wrong in the room.
Week 8 · 14 September 2026
Cross-examining your own report
Week 9 — a peer hunts your draft Autopsy Report for self-serving narrative before you submit it, then you submit it.
Week 9 · 21 September 2026
When the autopsy lies
Week 10 — auditing your own finished report for survivorship bias and cherry-picked evidence, after this week's lecture.
Week 10 · 28 September 2026
Delivering a verdict someone can use
Week 11 — turning your findings into a cause-of-death verdict specific enough to help a future restaurateur, not just explain the past one.
Week 11 · 5 October 2026
The coroner's inquest
Week 12 — presenting the finished case to the class and defending your verdict under cross-examination, capstone of the semester.
Week 12 · 12 October 2026